1.    Jesus Christ, risen and perfectly alive among us, lives as a human God’s own life. Since we live in Christ, and since Christ lives God’s own life, the whole point of all this Christian stuff is to live God’s own life like Jesus does.

2.    We profess one baptism. The one baptism is the baptism that Jesus experienced. Our baptisms are participations in Jesus’s own baptism.

3.    Baptism is a sacrament. Sacraments are where God gives us divine life through the Church’s symbolic actions. Sacraments involve showing something, and saying something. 

4.    Baptism shows us something about what it means to live God’s life: a soaking, a washing clean, and a going down and coming up. 

5.    Baptism says something about what it means to live God’s life: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

6.    Baptism is a soaking. In baptism, we are immersed in the Holy Trinity, saturated with God’s life. It gets in our bones and doesn’t go away.

7.    Baptism is a washing clean. Baptism forgives sins. We are baptized into Christ, who is God. So baptism is the connection to God through which our sins keep being forgiven.

8.    Baptism is a dying and a rising. It symbolizes, foretells, expresses all of the deaths and resurrections, big and little, we have experienced, are experiencing, and will experience. It promises rebirth out of every death.

9.    Baptism doesn’t stop when we come out of the water. Baptism endures and grows. For the baptized, our baptism, everything flowing from it, is happening right now. 

10.    Baptism disposes us to participate in the Eucharist, to share in the communion of God’s life in the Church. It joins us to the community formed around the Eucharist, to live in such a way that we’re living not for ourselves but for others, because that’s what Eucharist is -- an outpouring of self for others in gratitude to God.

11.    The Church is the place where Christ’s word and sacraments are explicitly recognized and celebrated – showings and sayings. But the risen Christ sends his Spirit to all humankind by way of the deepest dimensions of human personality and human community. 

Mark 1:9-13

⁹And it happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. ¹⁰And as he was coming up out of the water, he immediately saw the heavens being ripped apart and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him; ¹¹and a voice came out of the heavens: “You are my beloved child; in you I have taken delight.”
¹²And immediately the Spirit hurled him out into the wild and empty places, ¹³and he was in the wild and empty places for forty days, being tested by the Accuser; and he was with the wild animals; and the angels were serving him.
 

Romans 6:3-4

³ Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. ⁵ For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.


What a strange and astonishing situation! We did not really die, we were not really buried, we did not really hang from a cross and rise again. Our imitation was symbolic, but our salvation a reality. Christ truly hung from a cross, was truly buried, and truly rose again. All this he did gratuitously for us, so that we might share his sufferings by imitating them, and gain salvation in actuality. What transcendent kindness! Christ endured nails in his innocent hands and feet, and suffered pain; and by letting me participate in the pain without anguish or sweat, he freely bestows salvation on me.
(St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Baptismal Sermon #2)


In the Book of Genesis creation of life is presented as the liberation of the dry land from the water – as a victory of the Spirit of God over the waters – the chaos of nonexistence. In a way, then, creation is a transformation of water into life.
What is important for us, however, is that the baptismal water represents the matter of the cosmos, the world as life of man. And its blessing at the beginning of the baptismal rite acquires thus a truly cosmic and redemptive significance. God created the world and blessed it and gave it to man as his food and life, as the means of communion with Him. The blessing of water signifies the return or redemption of matter to this initial and essential meaning. By accepting the baptism of John, Christ sanctified the water – made it the water of purification and reconciliation with God. It was then, as Christ was coming out of the water, that the Epiphany – the new and redemptive manifestation of God – took place, and the Spirit of God, who at the beginning of creation “moved upon the face of the waters,” made water – that is, the world – again into what He made it at the beginning.
(Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World)


The day of our baptism returns to us out of a remote past. It has returned as our future – for blessedness or for judgment. We must go forward along the way we started, we must not swerve from it as we grow older. Therefore on such a day, in such an hour, we must say within our hearts: “I desire this baptism which gives me eternal life; I repeat and promsie that I will wear my wedding garment unstained all my life; the light of faith and love shall not be spent; I will go on to the end of the way which I began to follow in that day; it leads to eternal life.
(Karl Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments)